School Choice Problems
by Paul Weyrich
Issue 94 - October 24, 2007

The school choice battle has come to Utah and it is a battle every American should know about. Let me explain what is going on, what is at stake, and provide a little bit of historical analysis that might give us some insight as to what might happen in November.

Oversimplifying (of course), Utah has on the ballot a referendum on a voucher program passed by the Legislature earlier this year. Utah spends $7,500 per pupil in the public school system. The voucher program would provide between $500 and $3,000, depending upon family income, to students switching to private schools. An average voucher is projected to be less than $2,000, which would create a savings of more than $5,500 as to every student who used a voucher.

In my 40 years of public policy analysis, I have seen perhaps a half-dozen referendum votes on the issue of school choice. There was Colorado in 1992, California at least three times (1993, 2000 and 2003), Oregon twice (1990 and 1997) and Michigan in 2000. No doubt I’m forgetting some.

In every case the voters rejected the increased freedom, lower costs and better performance promised by education vouchers or tax credits.

As one often accused of a populist approach to politics, I have a great deal of confidence in the people. Why is my faith in their innate good sense betrayed by their repeated rejection of school choice?

There are at least three reasons.

The first is that school choice activists get outspent, usually by overwhelming margins. Of the cases I have mentioned, only in Oregon in 1990 did choice advocates outspend the education establishment. That was because there was a larger tax initiative on the ballot that year as well, and the whole establishment focused upon that.

The spending disparity is not surprising. Typically, the advocates of change in a state have to rely upon the citizens of that state for financial support. There are several national school-choice organizations, such as the Alliance for School Choice and Citizens for Educational Freedom, which will provide some funding, but their resources pale into nothing compared with the teachers’ union juggernaut.

The National Education Association (NEA) has a huge fund dedicated to fighting school choice, replenished continually from the dues coerced from its members (who may or may not support school choice). NEA is in every state. It can channel money taken from school-teachers in all 50 states to a battle in a single state, inasmuch as normally the battle is fought one state at a time. So when Colorado had school choice on the ballot in 1992 the NEA could direct its fire on that one (smaller) state, overwhelming the resources of the choice advocates. NEA already has sent $1.5 million to Utah to fight the referendum, about three times what the pro-parent-choice forces have spent, and indications are that there is at least that much more to come.

Recognizing that this battle isn’t going away, the unions have in recent years beefed up their defensive fund. NEA spent $10 million to defeat Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s education reforms (which were much weaker than real school choice) in California in 2005, and the union has since doubled the size of its fund for these efforts. The NEA effort is likely to lessen.

So the education establishment has plenty of money to disseminate its message. The nature of that message is a second reason for its success.

It always is easier to maintain the status quo than to have real change, and teachers’ unions have available to them an array of appealing sound bites that reinforce the status quo. “Don’t take precious funds from our children’s schools” is always good, as is “This is a risky, flawed proposal.” “Risks” and “flaws” are winners in a referendum battle. They stick in the mind and they are easy to fit on lawn signs.

The education establishment will say that a dollar spent to educate a child in a private school is a dollar that can’t be spent in the public schools, to which most people send their children. Choice supporters can explain that dollar invested in private education saves the public school system $3.75 in costs, but there is an old adage in electoral politics: when you are explaining, you are losing.

The third reason for the difficulty in getting school choice lies in the resilience of the American people and their resistance to the social engineering that is the stock in trade of the education establishment.

Let me illustrate with what perhaps is the starkest issue: religion in the classroom. NEA and the remainder of the establishment would like to eliminate God completely from the public schools, but despite numerous Supreme Court decisions and decades of American Civil Liberties Union and related activism, His presence persists. In everything from sex education to creationism, the conservatism of the American people (and we have to remember that classroom teachers are American people), keeps Him there. Heavens! (and I use the word advisedly), there are still schools in these United States in which children read the Bible and pray to God in the name of Jesus Christ. (There aren’t many, and their numbers are declining, but some are still there.)

That being the case, a significant plurality of the voters just doesn’t see any reason to mess with the public school system. Their children are still being educated pretty much as they were educated themselves, by teachers who believe in God and country, and who are willing to communicate that belief to the students.

Now mind you, I think those parents are making a mistake. If God has not yet been extirpated from the public schools, His influence is certainly diminished, and it is only a matter of time before He is gone entirely. That is the goal of the educational establishment, and given time and money, it will succeed.

Paul M. Weyrich is Chairman and CEO of the Free Congress Foundation